vaultofthearchonfandomcom-20200214-history
106408-struggling-to-see-a-vision-or-a-direction
Content ---- That's racist. | |} ---- I think Carbine's definition of "Hardcore" differs from what most people think. Hardcore IS NOT: Running dungeons over and over just to have bugs and RNG determine your loot. Farming dailies for 25+ days to reach Beloved. 49 weeks of Elder Gems. Timers in dungeons Severely gated content. RNG in general. Hardcore IS: Encounters that get progressively more challenging. Tiered content Telegraphs | |} ---- ---- ---- Definitely not a scam, I mean think about it - the revenue they've taken in since launch can no way pay for 7+ years of dev. Plus, most the people working on the game are known and trusted in the industry. That and NCSoft is not know for ripping people off - that would be very bad for their corporate image. My guess is we have different cooks in the kitchen that have different philosophies and we are paying the price for it. I can almost hear some of the CRB employees screaming in agreement with many of the gripes lately. But I agree - rep grinds, RNG, god forsaken soul sucking dailies do not equal hardcore. | |} ---- ---- Dunno about links, I get it through my smartphone but I listen to a few Wildstar podcasts (I have about a dozen or more podcasts in general I cycle through). The ones in question are the Wildstar Nation (less fanboyish, more vulgar) and Wildstar Radio (no vulgarity, very fanboyish). Ironically, the statements I mentioned were made on Wildstar Radio in its latest episode. Its something that really prompted me to write this post. I figure...if THESE guys/gals are losing faith, wtf is going on? And this is sort of my general point for speaking up at all. Honestly...I'm the customer they need. Everyone like me is. The paying subscriber. Without us, the CREDD players (no offense) will have no one to buy CREDD from. Thus, without the people willing to pay cash for a game, there will be no CREDD player base. Its not the $15 for me. This isn't some child-like rant about what Carbine owes me for $15. Such things don't exist in a real economy. Carbine produces a product, I can choose to consume it or not. There is no responsibility here on Carbine. They don't 'owe' me anything. However, if the entire theme of the last 2-3 weeks of Dev posts on the forums, the Nexus Report/Weekly and the like is a theme of, "Whoops! We screwed that up to, give is a bit and we'll sort it out!" it makes me wonder if they can. Frankly, I sat for 25 minutes tonight in a Rated Daggerstone Pass queue before giving up. 25 minutes in content that is about a week old (maybe less). Even Practice Daggerstone was a 10 minute wait. My mining circle doesn't bother mining anymore. The economy game feels pointless (I'm an economist by trade and even I can't bring myself to participate meaningfully in it). Carbine is offering timelines that extend into the "several months" from now range. Listen...keep the Defile. I don't want it. I want to hear that Dungeons don't require people skipping half the trash in order to feel successful. I want to hear that PVP is fun, exciting and competitive. I want to hear that gear progression is meaningful and predictable. I want a game. Not a paid beta. I don't know if I believe Carbine can do that, hence my OP. | |} ---- Dungeons don't require skipping content to feel successful; people who only care about medals don't feel successful with out them. PvP IS fun and exciting (esp. the new map), but it is also PvP so by nature you have to deal with getting your rear handed to you with frequency and the occasional bot or several (though I've seen less of them recently). The only real problem with PvP atm is gear; which will always be a problem as long as they keep PvP gear in the game. Gear progression is as meaningful as you want it to be. The majority of pre-raid BiS pieces are from dungeons, adventures, and open world bosses, It may not be a perfectly straight linear progression, but it's there and for those who need to have the BiS in every slot they can run the content and do it; it just takes commitment. The triple RNG was a cool idea; but folks are very upset that they can't pwn the min/max game with a single drop. I might be the only one who enjoyed random slots in D2 but in retrospect it made me use a wider variety of gear than I would have otherwise (thats a plus IMO, your mileage may vary). IMO Carbine's biggest problem is caving to players. in OG FFXI it took a month + to get past all the gates just to access raiding zones, then a week or two's worth of farming.. PER instanced HNM. IF you failed, you lost the items and had to farm for another week or two just to pop the HNM's again for another single try. Call me old school, but I actually really loved that stuff. When you finally got your single drop to be fought over by 18 people from the HNM it took a week to farm for; that felt like acomplishment. Nothing in SWTOR, new WoW, FFXIV, or the other fluff floating around captures that; even W* didn't fully manage to get there... but it got darn close IMO. Sadly, that will probably go soon enough; once the gates are taken down folks can blast into raids and rush to BiS in days to weeks rather than weeks to months. In reality, W*'s bugs are comparable to every other MMO's; the PvP isn't as good as WAR's was, but better than many other mmo's. The dungeons are refreshingly difficult, the adventures are a nice touch, the timers for medals are not terribly different than enrage timers in a raid or WB, they just work for the full team over a full run rather than just the DPS during a single fight (they are essentially enrage timers for EVERY role for the full instance; just it's the players, not the monsters that enrage if they go over on time). The only Majorly broken part of W* is it's players...The game itself is honestly not bad at all beyond what is to be expected in any new MMO. Obviously the above is my personal opinion; take it for what it's worth. | |} ---- Would you prefer they never admit they were wrong about some things, and just make changes up in an Ivory Tower and never tell us what is coming or what their plans are? I've found that's how most dev teams choose to project those things. My preference is a more open and honest dialogue like we get here. Sure if you want to cherry pick the negatives like you did for your post, it sounds pretty bad. However there are dozens of changes in every drop that address player's real concerns, and never get much commentary because it's less fun to talk about positives than it is to argue about negatives. | |} ---- ---- ---- Maybe I've had a few too many beers, but I've read this post a few times and I have no effing clue wtf you are saying LOL | |} ---- I don't think you'll find any one answer to your question, but my not so wild guess is that there's issues at Carbine - specifically with the management. | |} ---- ---- The problem is you have to get those to gain access to endgame. It's not optional. Yeah, I love just strolling through dungeons and having a good old time... unfortunately once you need that attunement that's no longer an option, even if playing with friends. | |} ---- Yeah I have to say, some Carbines are probably regretting adopting a relatively open (I'm saying "relatively" because there's still complete silence on some things) information policy. It just opens them up to that much more criticism. But while I appreciate the honesty in several areas, I also agree with the OP and other posters who complain that there have been severe oversights that are hard to understand from any perspective (like triple RNG). Of course nobody is perfect. It's just disconcerting from the angle of "how can they improve the game if they thought this was a good idea in the first place". | |} ---- What I got out of his post: subscribe to whales. | |} ---- ---- ---- ^^ This. Absolutely. I suspect the quickly diminishing subscription renewal rate is opening some eyes quite quickly. I just had to delete 40% of my neighbor list as they had not logged on in over 2 weeks! I've learned to solo '2+' mobs regularly in daily zones (especially crimson badlands) because, i kid you not, no one else is even in the zone to help! Scorchwing gets killed about twice/three times a day, if we are lucky, on our server because the increase in time to kill (not difficulty or anything that makes sense like that, mind you) made it hard for low pop servers to field the kinds of numbers for the fight to be reasonable. We kill it with 10 ppl half the time! Just takes a long time... It certainly feels like Carbine has absolutely no idea what they are doing right now and are completely out of touch with their player base. It may not be the player base they wanted to attract (100% 'hardcore') but it's the player base they got (.1% 'hardcore') so they better adjust or watch it all fall down like so many MMOs before it. Should have seen the tears, literally, at the Bethesda financial report thing... OMG did ESO, and it's poor results, cause some pain. | |} ---- .. but when I do, TLDR. | |} ---- Well said, exactly my idea of what hardcore should/ should not be. I would just add that the pain and time-consuming task of organizing 40 mans should not be considered hardcore either, the high-end raid content IS what should be hardcore, and in that respect 20 mans and 10 mans are better. Let the players focus on playing and overcoming challenging content, do not make waste their time on tedious tasks with no entertaining value. There would be a lot more guilds raiding with smaller raid sizes and that would give tons of players a reason to resub once they've reached 50. | |} ---- ---- God dammit almost lost the coke in my mouth when i read this. | |} ---- ---- "we" as in "you" ? | |} ---- So you are saying you don't see how they have *cupcake*ed up? | |} ---- All Chua see is Human trolling and being toxic all over place. Did troll not quit? | |} ---- I'm not trolling to be honest, I wish I was. I Wish I could troll this hard about the state of endgame. I WISH I could troll about how bad PvP is in this game. I also WISH I could troll on how bad RNG is. /edit I'm pointing out obvious flaws. Also I don't play W* anymore, I still post in hope that the Devs can buckle down and fix this game. | |} ---- ---- ---- Nothing wrong with RNG. The only issue is when you have this much RNG 1.) Item drops 2.)# of runes 3.) Type of runes 4.)Other players rolling for said item. | |} ---- I do agree that especially the rune part is just ridiculous. | |} ---- ---- what a idiot. To the OP really good post, does make you wonder why they all over the place. | |} ---- ---- Careful the trolls are out today.Agreed though. | |} ---- If you're going to quote me and then call me out, quote me properly. Saying that by paying a SUB with a credit card makes someone better then another who subs with ingame CREDD is bs. | |} ---- ---- well this man has taken the beat stick to the entire (lead) dev team. damn i cant wait for frost to " whine rant" on todays stream over this one | |} ---- ---- I actually had no idea it was so specifically step-by-step - the sheer bugginess of the elemental has kept me from following the chain any farther until they bother making the fight work - but uh... What does this mean if you come into the process with maxed Reputation? Does it reset you? Jump you forward a step? Have I misread something and there's another rep entirely? | |} ---- Nah, rep is the only thing in the chain you can do prior to reaching that step in attunement. What is wrong the Pyralos? | |} ---- you can still make him unkillable with dots | |} ---- That's what I suspect, one or two people of major influence got greedy and influenced the bad decision as a the loot table. I can live with the bugs, all the other faults about the game, I don't really care about that. But when they are squeezing money off the "casuals" and "middle" class like serfdom, you are not going to attract more players. That's what 3rd world countries do and why you have a gap between rich and poor. If Carbine wants to succeed, they need to make a "middle class" more accessible. Even if they revamp the loot system halfway, I think that'll win a lot of players back. | |} ---- ---- Well the devs are learning that their ideas don't work so well. | |} ---- Mostly it was this one. Happened upon a couple randoms trying to smash him down, figured we'd hop in and help and wrap it up faster. Four "entire platform is overlapping fire for almost a minute" later, I walked off, decided not to sell the Key because that's a waste of 75 gems (nothing else goes there), and resigned to doing dailies until some actual content arrives for me. | |} ---- It doesn't help that you have people who throw objectivity out the window and scream "CASUAL!" any times someone points out a legitimate problem with the game. | |} ---- CASUAL!!! jk couldn't help myself. ^THIS right here! not sure I'd come back just for this one change, but it would sure help. | |} ---- I know, but to every positive there is a negative. Which sucks, I want to see this game thrive, I really do. The way things are now though, it's looking grim for W*. | |} ---- Your post loses all its oomf with this one remark. You do realize as long as there is a CREDD market Carbine makes more money right? Also I'm sure most can easily afford the 15 a month, but rather save it and use in game money. | |} ---- ---- So i should DoT him right? | |} ---- OP, I see your complaints and they are mostly valid, but I have to also agree with what Lemurian is saying here. Admitting when you're wrong and working to correct your mistakes ARE signs of competence. | |} ---- I'm not quite sure what to make of this; "So...help me out here as a paying subscriber (not a CREDD subscriber). This is not meant as a snarky post. Its meant solely as my understanding of the things I've seen and read. I really want to be wrong on this. Where is my sense of competence, confidence and vision coming from for this game and the company that drives it?" I think if you browse the Dev Tracker, you'd see they built systems that they thought were sound(and I generally feel attunement and runes aren't bad) but the community in general has proven them flawed in practice. I like the general idea of randomized rune slots to negate the "best in slot" sameness of gear, but in practice it makes min-maxers roll on gear that they already have, away from other players. This would happen anyways to some extent because ninjas gonna ninja, but this is one of those systems where the community ruins what's good on paper(non same-y gear). Maybe a re-roll mechanic for the loot you already have, like D3's Enchanter? I ran Scholomance easily over 50 times to get my Dreadmist Cowl to drop in vanilla from the last boss. I think the devs expected people to be wanting to run dungeons a little more often, and I'm personally surprised they're not(especially with the criticism that Pandaria never patched in any 5-mans and commited to 3-man scenario babymode instead). I know the major complaints are the medal times and no guarantee on purples, but for a headpiece I expected to wear into Molten Core for awhile, I was okay with the low drop rate and running content for the chance at loot. Looking back at it, Vanilla WoW was on a 2 year, 3 month timetable. Some people didn't actively raid until halfway thru that lifecycle, and I believe a lot of people are frustrated that they aren't fully geared and pushing progress in the faster timeframe they expected. This is a problem both with a partially educated community(had some foreknowledge and expectations, but not everything they should have known objectively) and skewed nostalgia from both the devs and players. I think there's plenty of competence, vision & confidence on display from Carbine in the existing game. Carbine seems willing to compromise with the players who aren't willing to look for a wandering Rexxar for 3 days straight or cant find competent people to run the Blackrock jail break without completely casualizing the game as a whole. The players have had an open book with refunds, free trials available to see exactly what's going on under the hood and in the offices with staff communication. The MMO player's culture has shifted, and expectations have never been higher for some unrealistic blend of hardcore repetition and casual rewards. | |} ---- there are plenty of old quotes hat have fallen off the radar that -there was the time they touted staying in beta an extra year because they were done with the game a desided to polish and start of post launch content - the time they came out and said aoe was fine to be competitive with single target ( this was more flabbergasting as a major paradigm shift in the last days of closed beta) there are mountains o little things that have washed away what little confidence the players have in carbines vision and competence. Sure one day they might a game that deserved the hype wildstar had, but with all the slow stunted progress most players will already be permanently turned off to the game. | |} ---- ---- | |} ---- NO ONE ever said that players who pay by CC are better than those who use credd. YOU inferred that. And that comment has NOTHING to do with race. Perhaps you meant "discriminating"? Big difference there pal. So in essence his statement is correct, and YOU helped prove it. | |} ---- Vanilla dungeons had trash mobs(but not bosses) respawn if you took too long/wiped too much, and CC was mandatory, there was no carrying people until the fall of 06 when people were kindly doing dungeons for scrubs while in their full t2/aq/naxx gear. | |} ---- the problem is carbine basically copied the loot ideals from Arpgs, and in games where loot flows free like the SPICE and is as disposable as tissue paper. in a game like wildstar we put in to much effort to get most loot drops to mess around needing to spend ages farming up "perfect" loot. note you dont need perfect loot it is a part of the drive to improve the problem here is some time around the end of TBC and the Start of wrath raids shifted from the exercise of the hardest core minority of playerbases, to a very open spectacle of the raw majesty of a devs creativity, ingenuity and excellence. trust me carbine come with their a game and focused on being a better more engaging place to experience instanced content, we wouldn't be here debating the failings of wildstar. we would be on the roof tops screaming about how the adventures/dungeons/raids are the best *cupcake*ing thing since sliced bread and its worth ignoring every bug and crummy itemization. hell if they brought the a game and the noise to Pvp; we might have the game to throw wrench even lols strangle hold on e-sports. | |} ---- Raids aren't 'Endgame' TM Protostar. Raids are hardcore content that is PART OF endgame for the most dedicated. Dungeons, Adventures, Warplots, Vet shiphands (once they make them live), world story, and all the other fun stuff folks do after 50, which includes but is not limited too 'Raids' TM Protostar are what comprise 'Endgame.' Many people have fun running adventures and dungeons for their own sake (I know I enjoy it with a good group of friends). TLDR: Raids are hardcore content, not the entirety of endgame. People are treating the entirety of endgame besides Raids as if it is nothing but a staircase; if your perspective is that skewed, you aren't going to have a good time. It's not the drive to improve, it's 'Otaku' or 'collector' culture. J&AMMO's put it in because they know their playerbase leans towards that collection culture. In W* there is practically no time spent getting loot drops compared to J&AMMO's. example, OG FFXI; took a minimum of 6 months to obtain a single relic weapon from Dynamis with all the farming for the components and the massive time and money sink to produce and upgrade pre-artifiact weaps. This all for a single piece of gear. In W* all it takes is RNG on a raid boss; in which you are guaranteed to get at least an Epic or two as long as you kill it. Honestly, the adventures are pretty cool, and the dungeons aren't all that bad (IMO the adventures are a little more unique and fresh feeling than the dungeons just because of the mechanics). 100% agree, that is probably the biggest problem. IMO, the pre TBC raid system was much better. Everyone and their mother running dumbed down raids devalues the entire enterprise of raiding. It takes raiding from an exciting and challenging piece of content to enjoy; to a mindless gear farm to get shinies... Something I am very glad W* tried to avoid.. though they will likely cave to the players and get closer to the latter rather than the former. | |} ---- Raids are the natural endgame for the majority of PvE focused players. World story? Once you complete that arc it's over until the next drop. Can't really call that endgame. I'd agrue that dungeons and adventures are mainly and means to end - the end being raids. If people only want to do the 5 man content, that's totally cool but I'd imagine that would get awfully boring after a couple weeks or MAYBE a month. I think that is the animosity you see now, people that aren't in raids yet are just really fracking bored and it is hard to get consistent attunement groups going because people are on different steps and those that are done don't want anything to do with that content ever again (for the most part). | |} ---- What? In MMOs, only about 5% of the playerbase ever Raid. That's not quite a majority. | |} ---- ---- Where exactly did you pull that stat from? In every MMO I've ever played the majority of people either are raiding, want to raid or PvP. Sure, some people decide to focus on other things like crafting or "dailies" but without a true end game in place the game would wither and die. | |} ---- ---- To me hardcore is doing a 20 man raid with 12 players of the same tier.. So according to my point of view no one is hardcore except for those insane players that level a character to max level without dying once and with no gear other than a weapon lol Completing resident evil with just the knife .. that's pretty hardcore.. | |} ---- lol not even close, about 5% of raiders see all the content but there is a much much higher percentage of people that raid | |} ---- In WoW, it was estimated from wowprogress and other websites that about 500,000 players were Raiding when the overall population was 10m. That's 5%. | |} ---- it was estimated that 5% were doing the hardcore end game raiding, not the overall raiding experience. A ton more were just generally raiding. | |} ---- I know that number is well over 60%. If you ever enter any raid content (kinda hard not to in games with expansions, especially) it counts. Most of those people even get to at least experience the hardest content as it's being progressed. Less people do rated arenas than raid. | |} ---- When was the overall pop 10m? | |} ---- And I would say you are flat wrong. To each their own though, and I can respect your difference of opinion. The only reason folks think that raids = endgame though is because, as Geux mentioned, " raids shifted from the exercise of the hardest core minority of playerbases, to a very open spectacle". Raids originally were not endgame but for a small minority of players; they have since been devalued and expanded to be the end all be all. | |} ---- they were close to 12mil at one point | |} ---- Carbine has oficially stated raids would be seperate from world story. The secrets of the Eldan appear in quest hubs, scientist scans in exolabs, quest content, and Drusera's world quests, and cubes; Not raids. | |} ---- and all of GA is about the info you learned in that stuff. They aren't separate from each other | |} ---- You get the lore from the scans, cubes, and quests; the raids simply contain content from the Lore found elsewhere. It's true they aren't seperate; but to suggest Raids are where lore will be found puts the cart before the horse. The Lore all comes from non-raid sources; though obviously the raids incorporate the lore from the open world / other content. | |} ---- ---- and that's why you can almost guarantee you'll read about the eldan somewhere on the planet and run into them in a raid. I am pretty sure that was the point Quuarm was trying to make | |} ---- Right after BC was released their number were 11 mil, this was later found to be almost 50% double account holders (I myself had 2) and foreign gold farmers. Reducing the number of original accounts and players down to about 4-5.5 mil. | |} ---- I'm not saying that there weren't doubles I am just saying they had close to 12 mil subs at one point :D | |} ---- Per Wowprogress, roughly 60K guilds killed normal 25 man Lord Marrowgar and 84K guilds killed normal 10 man Lord Marrowgar. For those who didn't play WoW or don't remember, he was the first boss in the last raid instance of the Lich King expansion, so he serves as a proxy for "people who experience raid content at that time". If we assume every single one of the 25 man guilds also show up in the 10 man list then we have 60K + 24K guilds total. If we assume each 25 man guild got 40 people into the raid over time and each 10 man got 16 (both represent a 60% bench / replacement list) then we get a total of about 2.8M people who raided that expansion. Given that reported subscibers were 11.5 million at the time that would be roughly 25% of the population who stepped foot into raids. Call it 20-30% and you're probably in the ballpark. I have no idea where you're coming up with 60%. Edit: Ok, if you assume those numbers are correct (I'm not aware of any source for them) than 60% might be a reasonable "high" estimate. Do you have a source for reducing 11M to 4-5.5M? | |} ---- If we follow the above concept that he provided you can double the number you created and get right to about that 60% mark | |} ---- ---- Yup, that post came after I started mine. :) I edited mine to reflect that. I'm not aware of any source to support his numbers though, whereas I sourced mine. Edit: I might add, 5-6M accounts that are either second accounts or gold farmers is a bit hard for me to believe. If its true it's pretty amazing. | |} ---- ---- I'll have to do some digging in my GameInformers, there was an article about it there, I'll see if i can find it by the end of the day. But WoW also isn't the only MMO with raids, so we can't use only WoW's numbers either. | |} ---- |} So, if raids were originally intended for a small minority of players then there should be a rich, vast and interesting end game completely outside of raids. Um....where is it? Playing through the Drusera content once and Blighthaven once is interesting but I wouldn't call it an end game by a long shot. What else is there (for the PvE crowd, I won't even dive into PvP at this point)? Dailies? Rep grinds? I know there are some people that somehow enjoy that type of content but in no way does that justify a subscription or have enough depth to maintain subs and grow a player base | |} ---- Housing and roleplaying, that's about it not counting dailies, world story and PvP. Most endgames I see though in other games just end up being grinds. Now I do like these World Stories, but I do wish they would release more of them more often. | |} ---- You can finish the majority of the end game (excluding raids in this example) in about a day. Wooooo... so many fun! Totally worth a monthly subscription. | |} ---- I'd love to read it. And I agree, WoW might not even be the best representation of what an MMO like WS could expect, in part because many people play WoW because of the IP rather than because it's an MMO, which skews all numbers related to it. I only grabbed those numbers because they were easiest to find public sources to. :) | |} ---- Only slot count was going to be fixed, they intended to keep the randomized types but make the less useful ones "more useful" (not normalized). They were considering introducing a method to convert slot types but that came out as a grudgingly weak maybe. In other words, still a disaster. The fixed runeslots were making the 1800 weapon PvE BiS by far which provides fuel for the Boosters and wintraders, so yeah, that's what it looks like it was meant to address. | |} ---- Non-linear adventures, dungeons, Vet shiphands (once they are released), Warplots/ PvP, housing, scalable expeditions, world bosses, challenges, etc etc etc. Given this game is 2 months old, that list will grow and become more diverse. Obviously raids are included in the endgame content; but they aren't the end all be all. At release how much endgame did WoW have? SWTOR? FFXI? FFXIV? EQ 1 & 2 ? | |} ---- I don't disagree with your point Nott, but it's a strawman of what Quuarm said. We get the lore in cubes journals, scans, and quests in the game, and raids incorporate the lore from elsewhere. The point Quuarm was trying to make was very clearly stated: Which is 100% false. | |} ---- Link to where it says this? | |} ---- ---- ----